Many companies utilize contact centers, often referred to as call centers, to handle communications and transactions between customers and potential customers. These interactions may occur, for example, by way of telephone networks, internet connections, or voice-over IP connections.
These companies generally maintain databases that contain information essential to facilitating their business. These databases can be specific to a sector of the business. For example, companies will typically maintain a database with information on customers and potential customers, such as their names, telephone numbers, addresses, and order history. Other databases may contain employee information, such as their names, email addresses, extensions, and which company-defined group they work in.
In order to provide efficient customer support, an enterprise may implement a number of different systems that each use its own database. A typical contact center generally uses several customer interaction systems in its network. Examples of customer interaction systems include Automatic Call Distributors (ACDs), predictive dialing systems, web servers, email servers, work flow servers, or network routers. Further, each customer interaction system may employ its own software application native to that system, requiring a user to run a separate application to interact with each system, and consequently with each database.
Thus, call center administrators and managers entering an enterprise-wide resource may be required to individually administer the same resource in one or more contact center applications manually and repetitively. This requires a user to be trained in the use and administration of many different contact center application tools. The user must also be careful to avoid potential manual user errors, such as wrong or missed configurations, which may lead to lost time, troubleshooting and additional expenses. As a result, often an administrator must use one set of applications to monitor resource performance and utilization, and another set of applications to optimize, manage and/or make adjustments to these resources.
One example of a typical enterprise-wide system resource is a contact center agent, which is typically a human resource. This agent can be defined on the ACD as a resource for handling customer voice contacts, and also on the Workforce Management Applications (WFMs) as an object for scheduling and schedule forecasting purposes. Using the application-specific tools for each respective application, an administrator may define this agent on the ACD as Robert Lewis, and on the Workforce Management application as Bob Lewis.
Presently, a user such as a contact center administrator who wishes to keep track of Robert Lewis must utilize separate applications and systems to configure, manage and monitor Robert Lewis. Further, the administrator must also be aware that both Robert Lewis and Bob Lewis are one and the same resource when analyzing reports and when making changes to his attributes on the source applications. This problem becomes exponentially difficult and causes many administration and monitoring problems when thousands of resources are managed across numerous contact center applications.
Therefore, there is a need in the art to have a single application manage various parameters within many customer interaction systems across an enterprise to maximize efficiency and minimize discrepancies in data.